Customers today simply want efficient, effortless service, and are increasingly using chat as a way to get to the information that they are seeking. Chat usage rates have risen in the past three years — from 38% in 2009 to 43% in 2012 to 58% in 2014. We find that all demographics - young and old - are comfortable with chat. Chat can cost less than a voice call, especially for organizations that allow their agents to handle multiple chat sessions simultaneously. Its no wonder that there are hundreds of case studies that showcase the power of chat.

The chat vendor landscape is crowded, and recently I profiled the capabililties of 21 vendors. Because of the wealth of vendors in this space, you have to be clear about your chat strategy, and your core requirements. Here are 5 questions to help you articulate your goals for chat.

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The US health insurance industry is in the midst of a tectonic shift. Since federal legislation mandated health coverage for all US citizens, health insurers have been pivoting away from pure B2B models to reinvent themselves as B2C services – and they’ve been responding to the demands of a new target group: consumers who purchase their own health insurance.

Earlier this year, we published a blog post detailing the channels customers use when purchasing health insurance. But mapping customers’ physical interactions with a company is only part of the story – understanding their emotional evolution is just as important. According to Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® data, a mere 50% of consumers who purchase their own health insurance feel that the brand puts them first; others believe health insurers do what’s best for their own bottom line at the expense of customers. The former are not only emotionally satisfied, they are also loyal to their current health insurer and willing to spend on additional products and services:

Last year, Michael Facemire and Rowan Curran published a report entitled A Benchmark To Drive Mobile Test Quality. As a result of being the new guy on the team, I was asked to give that particular report a refresh. I scheduled a series of interviews and updated the report. It’s on its way into the editing process; I’ll post an entry here when it’s published.

Much of the report is targeted at QA and mobile app testing; there are some pretty interesting stories in the report that talk about how development organizations are integrating more sophisticated testing strategies into their continuous delivery pipelines. Mobile app testing has always been an interest of mine and working on that report allowed me to dig even deeper into the topic. What I learned is that there are a lot of new tools available to Application Development and Delivery professionals that allow them to more easily deliver higher quality, more thoroughly tested mobile apps.

As a result of that work, we’ve decided that I’ll continue to do research and write on that topic. I’ll soon begin work on an update to the existing Market Overview: Mobile App Testing report. Next, Diego Lo Giudice and I will begin work on a Forrester Wave on the topic. Stay tuned, I’ll post here when I have more solid delivery timelines for the reports.

Unless you're in a regulated industry, or headquartered in the European Union, chances are that your privacy organization has been limited to one or two lawyers, and maybe a data security expert. This small group has probably been tasked with making sure the firm is in compliance with local laws, and with writing and managing onerous and impenetrable consumer-facing privacy policies. In other words, these teams have worked to keep the company out of legal trouble.

But data privacy, collection, and use practices are becoming more visible, to regulators, to media and ultimately to individuals. And as a result, firms need a different kind of privacy organization to meet the need for transparency head-on.

So tell us, has your privacy organization changed in the past few years? Are you staffing it with new skillsets? Creating more dotted lines to teams like marketing, product development, etc? Changing from a compliance-focused organization to one poised to capitalize on privacy as a market differentiator?

If so, my colleagues, Heidi Shey, Enza Iannopollo and I would love to hear from you for current research we're working on. Reply here, or email fkhatibloo@forrester.com, and THANKS!

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Your customers are inundated with messages every day from friends or family, work colleagues, and marketers among others. Notifications from their banks, news organizations and fitness bands also land on their mobile phones. Let me show you the home screen of my iPhone.

A summary of my communication (or lack thereof) shows:

24,998 unread personal emails (okay, mostly from marketers)

4,937 unopened work emails

272 unopened SMS messages

45 unopened/read messages on WeChat (these are from marketers)

0 unread notifications from Facebook (and I average 23 per day)

0 unread notifications from Slack (and I average 87 per day)

I still use all of these communication channels, but I pay more attention to some of the channels than to others.

Here’s what is happening:

My email inbox has been overrun by emails I no longer read or want.

I continue to download new communication applications. Each time I do so, I am very selective about who I add into my new circle.

I pay most attention to those applications that offer value to me in the form of entertainment or as in the case of Slack, collaboration with a very small group of trusted colleagues. These messages are extremely relevant to me – and personal.

When I tell friends and family I’m researching the future of the digital store, they more often than not conjure up a certain image in their heads: robotic sales associates, augmented reality dressing rooms, holographic advertising displays, and maybe even hovercraft-friendly shopping malls (à la The Jetsons).

And while components of digital stores are absolutely in line with this flashy and quintessentially futuristic vision (Samsung’s virtual fitting room—equipped with 3-D cameras and depth perception software—can virtually drape an article of clothing over a shopper’s reflection, for example), here’s the thing: some of the most revolutionary digital store innovations are actually completely invisible to the customer. In other words, we may not always notice it happening around us, but digital store transformation isn’t some far-off ideal that retail executives are ruminating on from the sidelines. For leading retail organizations, the store of the future is already well underway.

In our new report The Future Of The Digital Store we tackle the role of technology in today's physical shopping experience. The report explores how stores are successfully utilizing digital technology to:

Even though Business Intelligence applications have been out there for decades lots of people still struggle with “how do I get started with BI”. I constantly deal with clients who mistakenly start their BI journey by selecting a BI platform or not thinking about the data architecture. I know it’s a HUGE oversimplification but in a nutshell here’s a simple roadmap (for a more complete roadmap please see the Roadmap document in Forrester BI Playbook) that will ensure that your BI strategy is aligned with your business strategy and you will hit the road running. The best way to start, IMHO, is from the performance management point of view:

Catalog your organization business units and departments

For each business unit /department ask questions about their business strategy and objectives

Then ask about what goals do they set for themselves in order achieve the objectives

Next ask what metrics and indicators do they use to track where they are against their goals and objectives. Good rule of thumb: no business area, department needs to track more than 20 to 30 metrics. More than that is unmanageable.

Then ask questions how they would like to slice/dice these metrics (by time period, by region, by business unit, by customer segment, etc)

In ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra, the beautiful daughter of the King of Troy, had the gift of prophecy with complete knowledge of future events. But the impact of Cassandra’s gift was stymied by her inability to alter the future or even convince others of the validity of her predictions. The metaphor of Cassandra hasn’t remained just an interesting myth. We see it applied in a variety of contexts, including politics, psychology, science, entertainment, philosophy, and business.

Since at least 1949, when French philosopher Gaston Bachelard coined the term “Cassandra complex,” organizations have been grappling with the disconnect between establishing a new vision for the business with the ability to reach consensus and actually move forward toward reaching that vision. Achieving a clear, shared vision is often difficult, as it does not match reality and many not feel a sense of urgency to change, resulting in a lack of commitment to the new vision. At the same time, those who support the new vision are termed Cassandras — they are able to see what is going to happen, but no one believes them. Even Warren Buffett, who repeatedly warned that the 1990s stock market surge was a bubble, earned the title of “Wall Street Cassandra.”

In case you haven’t noticed, the number of smartphone users in Asia Pacific has grown – we estimate that it breached the 1 billion mark in 2014. This is the first time that more people in the region used smartphones than feature phones.

When coupled with the fact that the region is also a leader in innovative messaging apps, such as WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk, marketing professionals can start to see how Asia Pacific is ripening into a mobile-led commerce and marketing harvest – creating a commercial marketplace where users interact and trade and offering organizations growing sales and marketing opportunities.

However, many B2C marketing professionals today limit that potential by only focusing on promoting flash sales or discounts, as seen on the likes of WeChat and Line. Marketers must consider longer-term use cases to fully mine these apps' potential. Unless a messaging app user is specifically searching for and ready to buy a particular product or service, marketers who continue to pepper the app’s chat room with meaningless discount messages will have wasted their investment. In addition, users will likely move to the next competitive (i.e., cheaper) offering when it comes along, running the risk of marketers facing a race to the bottom with cutthroat pricing.